JOURNAL

This blog is about the maker's life. The teacher's path. The stitching and dyeing and printing of the craft of art cloth and art quilt. The stumbling around and the soaring, the way the words and the pictures come together. Poetry on the page and in the piecing of bright scraps together. The inner work and the outer journeys to and from. Practicalities and flights of fancy and fearful grandeur, trivial pursuits and tactile amusements. Expect new postings two or three times a week, unless you hear otherwise.

Distinguish your work by finding a vocabulary of shapes, images, marks that are personal and explored over and over - find your artist voice by refining, repeating and elaborating a process. This course will not be technique-or media-oriented, but will help you define and focus your work though the active creation of a series (five to 10 pieces) within the parameters of your self-selected direction.

Here are the next two summer classes that you might be interested in. Both are at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, and both are perfect for teachers and/or parents interested in helping kids be more creative -- the weekend course will focus on classroom fiber arts activities, including collaborative and individual projects. The parent's class will give anyone who works with kids the vocabulary of "The Missing Alphabet." a powerful tool to help kids face the future we can't predict.

2381 | Fiber Art: Fit for the Classroom

Whether you teach 4th grade or high school art classes (or just want some fiber art fun with your own kids or grandkids), there's a fiber art technique that will add texture, print, and even a bit of sparkle to your creative activities. Monday, whose experience with a wide range of classrooms and ages of students, will teach a variety of fun and manageable fiber art techniques and design approaches for use with children. Examples include mono-printed fabric art cards, easy screen-printed portrait tee-shirts, fabric paper collage, and fused fabric banners. These activities can be part of a formal art curriculum, or used by any educator to integrate the arts through new skills. Please see SSA website for a list of materials; bring a lunch each day.

Discover more about your child’s learning. Explore their world of creativity, and find ways to stimulate and enhance it. With artist-educator Monday, co-author of

New World Kids: The Parent’s Guide to Creative Thinking as your guide, find out how to support, focus and direct your child’s creative thinking at home or at school. Hands-on activities, handouts, and an interdisciplinary approach characterize this invaluable class for the parents and teachers of creative kids.

The new (and somewhat revised) schedule is out and about. Here's a copy:

Nurture your creativity as you come away from a weekend with renewed energy, new materials and techniques in surface design applicable to fiber, ceramics, jewelry, painting and mixed media work. Susie Monday leads artists’ retreats and workshops throughout the year at her studio near Pipe Creek, Texas, about an hour from downtown San Antonio. El Cielo Studio workshops are designed with the needs of the participants in mind; free time is scheduled throughout the weekend for reading, reflection and personal work in the studio. You are welcome to bring projects in process for Susie’s critique and for peer feedback in an environment of trust and respect. You’ll share meals, poetry and stories, music and advice for living an artist’s life. Enjoy the 25-mile vistas from the deck, hot tub and pool time, and strolls down the country roads. The fee for each workshop retreat is $175 for a 2-day event with discounts for early enrollment. Comfortable accommodations are available from $15 - $30 per workshop. Most workshops offer a Friday night potluck option. Limited enrollment. Most supplies included.

Susie has taught creative process and art techniques to adults and children for more than 30 years. Her art is in private and public collections around the world.

Have you ever wanted to incorporate a favorite word, poem or quote into an art quilt, garment, art doll or other textile project -- going beyond simply writing or embroidering the text? This all new surface design/mixed media class will give you a set of process tools for making text and words an integral part of artfully designed fabrics that you can use in a wide variety of projects. Learn soy wax lettering, freeform cut letters, sunprinting and more.

JUNE 15-17

Optional potluck

Friday night

FROM SCRIBBLE TO SYMBOL; PERSONAL MARK-MAKING

In this workshop, start with simple sketches and doodles and end the weekend with an arsenal of new surface design tricks and tools. Explore doodles and scribbles as sources of uniques and personal imagery that will give your art quilts, wearable art, or mixed media work personal depth and layers of meaning. take a favorite symbol -- for example a heart, star, spiral, circle -- and by taking it (and yourself) through a series of creative generative exercises, you’ll make something new and different to incorporate into your design, composition and surface design. Tools and techniques explored include paper lamination on fabric, large scale “mark-making” rollers and monoprinting.

JULY 6-8

CHANGE OF DATE

Optional potluck

Friday night

KITCHEN ALTAR WORKSHOP

Embrace your inner goddess of summertime. Design and make a small art quilt “altar” for kitchen or dining room with tools and materials that depend on heat, sunlight and passionate delight: sun-printing, vegetable prints, fusing, hand and machine stitching and “found” fabrics from attic, thrift store or kitchen closet. We will recycle napkins, tea towels and other like objects and design a thermofax featuring a meaningful symbol, favorite fruit, icon, saint, culinary relative, heroine, angel or other meaningful design as the centerpiece for the altar. (Altar frame, $12 supply fee).

AUGUST 17-19

NATURE INSPIRED

SURFACE DESIGN

Optional potluck

Friday night

Let late summer colors, shapes and even heat inspire your surface design. The weather is perfect for dyeing, dye-painting and soy wax! Sketching from nature, and from collected natural objects (don’t worry, you can do it), we’ll design one-of-a-kind fabrics, silk scarves and mixed media pieces.

SEPTEMBER 7-9

FEARLESS SKETCHING

Face your fears of drawing head on, as Susie takes you on a sketch and draw adventure, with no failures allowed. You’ll try different approaches, learn so me classic tips and tricks, and find out how drawing is a learned skill, not something you had to master as a 6th grader who “couldn’t draw horse like your best friend.”

WHAT PARTICIPANTS SAY ABOUT SUSIE’S CLASSES & WORKSHOPS:

“ The exercises we did this weekend were freeing on the one hand, but will also help me focus.”

“This workshop was a fabulous, uplifting, nurturing environment to create in. The journaling was particularly helpful, I would definitely recommend it to a friend.”

“Thank you for creating such a fun, yummy, comfortable, and inspirational experience...”

Above: Photo of Suzanne Wright Crain's altar in progress.

Deep work and deep play took all of us into wonderful work this past weekend. Here are some photos of artists at work -- some made altered books, some altars. Everyone, including me, found some insights pertinant to our particular time, space and needs.

Robin Early and Suzanne Wright Crain and Martha Grant work on their Archetype projects.

As we looked at various approaches to exploring our "inner teams," I had found some work by creativity coach and author Eric Maisel that shed light on the ways identity as an artist (or should I say identities) can both help and complicate our work, identity and paths. Am I artist the beautifier, artist the visionary, artist the businesswomen, artist the producer, artist the activist...??

Recently an infographic came across my path that also informed this pondering:

Certainly teaching a workshop such as this Archetype workshop calls on my skills as teacher and mentor, while I also try to do my own work ast least part of the time as a way of modeling and demonstrating the processes and products involved.

Then, as the weekend came to a close, a friend called and told me one of my large textile pieces was included in a "home" section report in the San Antonio Express News. I called the collector and thanked him (and his wife Suzi) for giving the reporter my name (read the story for more info!). Ah, another artist identity -- published and out there.

The dining room in the home of Suzi and Dennis Strauch, near Pipe Creek, has a quilted piece of fabric art on one wall.

A spot (or two) in my Archetypes workshop this coming weekend just opened up. Here's the scoop:

Calling All Archetypes

March 23-25 (Friday night optional)

Explore the inner team that keeps you going, makes a difference, inspires your best --- and sometimes holds you back. With journaling, fabric printing, collage and mixed media techniques galore, you'll explore the inside-operators that are part of your life story: empress, playful child, journeyer, pilgrim, maker... who knows who will come out to visit? Create a unique fiber art quilt altar to one of the archetypes. Learning fusing techniques and how to make a small art quilt "altar" stretched on a frame. Suitable for all levels.

Cost is $185, including $10 supply fee for altar frame. One private bedroom is still available, with two beds and private bath -- shared it's $15 each, single occupancy, $30. (Includes both nights.) Also a free sofa or sleeping porch bed is available. Most supplies are included.

We'll start on Friday night with optional journaling exercises, then begin at 9 am on Saturday. The workshop usually ends about 3 on Sunday.

Email me with the contact form on the sidebar if you are interested.

Below are two photos from previous workshop, the first is Julia's altar in progress, the second, Martha's.

As part of my online Joggles course (get the full story here) I'll be doing an occassional post here that my online students can use for further ideas; maybe those of you reading along can pick up a tip or two as well.

I've been pondering collage design with type and "found letters," those cut from magazines and newspaper or even spit out in differing sizes from your computer font library. Putting them together quickly, then arranging, rearranging and copying out bits and pieces in differing sizes is how I like to work on these random text collages -- I am not necessarily going for a literal message, more just the feel of type as shape and form and texture. But there is also an interesting challenge in using the letters of a meaningful or intriguing word that you might want to have as a kind of hidden message in a piece.

For example, this piece, while primarily a strong and bold composition, with text that pops out -- mas (Spanish for more) and LIFE from the classic magazine title -- also includes the "hidden message" "music." Each horizontal pieced band of fabric is a repetition of each letter M, U, S, I, C in order.

Here are some tips that may help you make some interesting collages with your type collections:

1. Work with CONTRAST:

SIZE -- Use as wide a variety of sizes as you can. Collage the letters with varied sizes as neighbors to those of other size.

VALUE -- Use strong contrast in value for the best copies -- black on white, red on white, dark hues on light pastels (AND vice versa) Avoid type -- or limit it -- that is too close in value to the background. Yellow reads as white and pale blues disappear on almost all copy machines

DIRECTION -- GLue the letters down in different directions, try to make a "patchwork" of letters facing different ways, upside down, left to right, right to left.

2. PATTERNS

Try these different ideas as ways to glue down a text collection -- think of different rhythms and different patterns to develop collages that have different feelings and messages in their composition:

swirling letters

marching across the page letters

letters lined up and making another shape

a tornado, a wave, a spiral, a crawl, a race, a path, windows in a house, people in a crowd, letters arranged to make animal shapes or objects. (Like concrete poetry, but letters only) See the alphabet video here for examples:

Letters on stage performing for other letters

3. Follow the rule of 3s

Use similar elements or copies of the same letter forms in odd-number arrangements: 3s, 5s, 7s. For some reason odd numbers of related shapes (etc.) always seem to work better in compositions.

4. GROUPS not POLKA DOTS

Arrange letters and elements close enough together that your eye "reads" the design with continuity -- just enough space between the elements (shapes, lines, dots, stripes, letters, etc) that your eye can easily leap to the next element, especially if it is a repeated element. Also, try to vary elements spacially, paying attention that you don't set up too regular a pattern (like polka dots) unless that is the rhythm you are trying for.

I'll be teaching this on on the Joggles forum, and have been working on ways to provide meaningful help and feedback. I am considering adding some experimental videos (on the side, with links on the course materials) so this will be have a learning challenge and curve for me as well. The video's won't be part of lesson one, since it's less a technique than a getting-started design lesson, but I'll work on the videos for others of the 5 lessons.

The workshop is only $45, so if you are interested, click over to the site and sign up now. The first of the lessons will be posted on Wednesday.

I've received my contract for teaching at the International Quilt Festival in Houston in October, 2012. It's an honor to be among the 100 quilt/art/mixed media instructors selected to teach this year -- I've been off the roster for two years, and just squeeked in with my application this year!

So if you are planning to attend and want to take one of my workshops, here are the relevant dates:

Wednesday, October 31, full day workshop, Shaping Symbols into Art Quilts

I'll tell you more about this as the time approaches, but the picture above provides a bit of info, too.

Sunday, November 4, Inspiration is in the Cards, half day workshop 9-noon.

"What inspires you? Create a one-of-a-kind card deck to spark creativity, take you out of your creative rut, move you into art-making and imagination. Collage and design your way to a new studio ritual with a variety of mixed media techniques."

This one is part of my annual agenda in the January Artist's Journey workshop (usually), but its a fun way to make a mixed media deck using collage, paint, paper and an inkjet copier.

In between, I'm on the circuit of the Mixed Media Miscellany, 2-4 on Thursday, the Friday Sampler, 10-noon and Saturday Sampler, 10-noon, with stamping and inkjet transfer demos.

Hope to see you there! And if you know someone who is planning on attending and taking classes this year, please reccommend these if you think they would suit. I'm looking forward to the wild, wacky, inspiring, overwhelming experience of festival, and I think everyone in our community of textile artists deserves the experience at least once in a lifetime. It's our tribe.

2. A poem shared by one of the Archetype Workshop's* registrants, Valerie, about the elemental forces she is working with for an exhibit entry:

A poem by Rumi: Answers from the Elements: from Coleman Barks book, The Big Red Book.

Writes Valerie:"I love Rumi's work, and will enjoy finding a way to illustrate it in an 84 " by 14" format - that long vertical is challenging! Here's the stanza with the responses of the elements to the question, Where is God?"

The moon says, I am dust stirred upwhen he passed by. The sun: My face is pale yellowfrom just now seeing him. Water: I slide on my head and facelike a snake, from a spell he said. Fire: His lightning,I want to be that restless. Wind: why so light?I would burn if I had a choice. Earth, quiet and thoughtful? Inside me I have a gardenwitn an underground spring.

3. And some thoughts from John Cage about work, (Did I already share the second...nevermind, it bears repeating).

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile. RULE TWO: General duties of a student – pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher – pull everything out of your students. RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment. RULE FIVE: be self-disciplined – this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way. RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make. RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something.

“Something my father remembered the composer John Cage saying to him during the 1950’s often came to his mind: ”When you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue, they start leaving one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” — Musa Meyer, “My Father, Philip Guston” (Image by Jon-Kyle)

* That Archetype workshop (almost full)

CALLING ALL ARCHETYPES

MARCH 23-25

(optional Friday night potluck & work-in-progress critique)

Spend some time thinking and working on using your inner crew for work and support. In this workshop we’ll explore archetypes, inner voices, gut reactions and their influence on your art and art-making with lots of improvisational exercises to loosen up your approach to art. Make a small artist's altar using fabric and mixed media techniques including mono-printing, collage and digital printing on fabric to remind you of a practical and sacred part of your life. (artist altar frame, $10 supply fee) Workshop fee $175, Lodging, free to $30 on site.

NOTE: This class requires use of an all-in-one printer/copier or desktop copier with the ability to enlarge and reduce printed images. The techniques used make use of copies and prints from such a copier/printer. Optional techniques included also involve use of a computer and digital camera.

Have you ever wanted to incorporate a favorite word, poem or quote into an art quilt, garment, art doll or other textile project -- going beyond simply writing or embroidering the text? Or do letter forms and shapes appeal to your sense of design? This surface design/mixed media class will give you a set of process tools for making text and words an integral part of artfully designed fabrics that you can use in a wide variety of projects.

Starting with design exercises that encourage a unique expression of your creativity and interests, you’ll learn three specific techniques for transfers of text, words and writing to fabric using ink-jet printing, polymer medium and textile paints.